Sai Kung Hike

This week a group of friends and I decided to go hiking at one of Hong Kong’s national parks called Sai Kung. We had it all planned out. We would take the subway to the furthest MTR subway station, then take a bus for an hour, and finally arrive at the destination at which we would begin our hike. My friend had brought a couple of tents with him so that we could spend the night on one of the camps around that area. Yet, there were some problems… First, we did not bring enough food. We had allocated roles for each one of the five members in the group, but for some reason we forgot to take food into account. Second, the weather was looking quite gloomy throughout the entire road trip. Even though the weather app said there would be rain all day, we did not trust it since it never rains for more than an hour straight in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, we decided to start hiking and try to reach the camp before the storm would ensue.

The scenery was quite lovely along the way. We walked through a couple of villages while the German guy in our group was trying to teach us to sing traditional German songs. At some point we came across a path that for some reason had 5-6 bulls chilling on it. At first, we were a bit scared but since they were just minding their own business, we decided to simply move on past them. It was getting dark and the first couple of droplets were beginning to fall on our sweaty faces. Suddenly, the unexpected happened. The storm began. Two of the five people in the group had umbrellas with them so we desperately tried to protect ourselves and the tents inside the backpack from getting absolutely drenched. Yet, our efforts were in vain. After, about half an hour the storm calmed down and we continued hiking. Once we finally arrived at the camping site, the relief was enormous. Two of the people in our group decided to go back home and the rest of us three set the tent up. The camping site was quite crowded. There were at least another fifty tents all around – big and small. We met a Chinese family that invited us to join them for dinner. To our surprise, the people there kept on feeding us till we couldn’t eat any more. Chicken, beef, pork, fish you name it. We weren’t sure whether we should decline after a point to be polite or we should stay till the end so that again we could be polite. Since we were really hungry after having hiked for hours, we decided to keep on till the end. At last, we were so full we could hardly move. We thanked the family from the bottom of our hearts and went back to our tent. Unfortunately, the storm had made a resurgence. This time, with a vengeance. The wind was blowing hard and the water was falling on us like a waterfall. We tried placing our very very wet tent below a roof which really helped our situation. Still, we had to fight against the wind, but we managed to sleep after all.